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In January of 2000 I moved to Joshua Tree, Ca to set up my art studio & explore the wonders of Joshua Tree National Park. This magical landscape called to me & brought forth a renewed creative energy to produce new works of art. The light, open space & quiet captured my attention & allowed for reflection on life’s challenges.

My work has always involved the use of color & texture in abstract forms. The original paintings I produced in the desert were based on the lichen forms found on the boulders throughout Joshua Tree.

A memorable encounter with Noah Purifoy & his Outdoor Museum inspired me to incorporate found objects from the desert landscape. My work took on a new look, using assemblage technique and materials I discovered on the property around my studio.

My most recent pieces use photo image transfers of plants and landscape with abstract elements inspired by the Mojave desert.

Exchanging ideas with and supporting other artists has always been a passion of mine. In 2009, I founded the Joshua Tree Art gallery (JTAG) with the help of local artists to share our work with the community. In partnership with the Mojave Desert Land Trust, I curated a Plein Air exhibition at JTAG, where sales of artwork benefited the preservation of desert wildness for our community. In 2007, I started the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency ( JTHAR.COM), which provides free living and studio space for artists from all over the world so they can experience the majesty of the Mojave.

Timothy Hearsum received his Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Fine Arts from Ohio University and the Visual Studies Workshop (program in photographic studies, State University of New York) respectively.

His work is in over 400 private, public and corporate collections including the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Palm Springs Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester; the Chicago Institute of Design; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

Hearsum has also participated in numerous one-person and group exhibitions including those at the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; the Nevada Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Rosa; the Oakland Museum; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Maine Photographic Workshop; the Rochester Institute of Technology; and the Louisville Photo Archive.

In 2001, Road Trips, a catalogue of Hearsum’s southwest panoramas was published. His photographs have also been included in a number of other art and photography books. Grants and awards include California Art in Public Places Program (1984); New Mexico Arts, Art in Public Places Program (2003); and the Santa Fe Arts Commission 2005-2006 City of Santa Fe Poster. He is represented by Getty Images, NY; Corbis, Seattle; SMINK, Dallas; and Santa Fe Editions, Santa Fe, NM.

My artistic mentor was my father, O.J. Watson. He was a talented and successful NYC illustrator in the 1950’s & 60’s before moving the family to Los Angeles to continue his commercial art career. My spiritual mentor, Barbra Ammon, was a very dear friend who I had studied with for over 30 years. Together, we had the opportunity to experience Benedictine Abbots and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These two major influences in my life passed away in 2016 and have combined to inspire my latest work.

This series, this year’s work, portrays the transformation that has taken place within me. This series, as a whole, is a summary of my experiences that I’ve tried to present in the most elementary way possible.

Two distinct components, a triangle and a square, are combined to transcend their inherent symbolism. A simple depiction of a house, the structure we live in, represents for me a soul in a body. Something confined or contained, yet retaining its connection to the unconfined and the eternal. The "Our House" series is a metaphor for this uniting of the soul with the body.

Artist Statement My new body of work is inspired by an evolving local urban environment, urbanization as a condition, and contemporary culture. Working for the past three years from my Venice, CA studio, I was viscerally impacted by the changing neighborhood and demographics: There is the noise and energy of new construction. Resulting structures are rising vertically to unexpected new heights, marginalizing once amply sunlit creative spaces. Graffiti of all shapes and sizes most often depicted on the grey backdrop of concrete, has become rampant as an exciting urban art form (street art) communicating an evolving cultural diversity. This is change and evolution, disturbing and exciting at the same time.

As an abstract artist, I typically communicate a theme and tonal palette with pattern, mark making, layering and textural effects through mixed media and collage. I strive to communicate beauty and elements of design readily visible in virtually all aspects of everyday life, if only we look. My work often evolves from an emotional response I have to current events and the human condition as I try to balance emotions of sadness or despair with a sense of playfulness – sometimes communicated by primary palettes of reds, orange, blue and yellow. Usually I don’t have a distinct plan in mind when I start a new project. It’s more important to me to work in the moment and non-objectively. As far as process goes, I allow myself the freedom to express without judgment or boundaries. Thoughts and ideas spill out on canvas, panel or paper. Drawings, layered patterns, shapes, colors and textures are merged, transformed and energized with paint, stained papers or newsprint, mylar and other materials. Although passionate about color, I often stick to a neutral palette, working with velvety black charcoal, inks, gouache and acrylic paints, with just an occasional surprise of pigment.

Mardi de Veuve Alexis is an abstract artist born and raised in California. She studied art and design while living in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington D.C. at the Corcoran School of Art; at UCLA in Los Angeles, and at Studio 33 in Culver City, California. Mardi has been painting for a more than a decade, experimenting with combinations of various media and textural effects, mixing charcoal, ink, pastel, acrylics and collage. Having traveled extensively throughout the world, her work is inspired by cultural diversity and her interpretation of the human condition. Mardi’s paintings and drawings have been shown and collected in California, Stockholm, Sweden; Croatia; Belgrade, Serbia; and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Collage, mixed media, line and textural effects characterize Mardi’s current body of work on canvas, panel and paper that is largely focused on urbanism and aerial landscapes. She is an Active Member of Women Painters West; Los Angeles Art Association; Artist Council, Palm Springs Art Museum; Morongo Basin Cultural Arts Council; and an Exhibiting Member of California Art League and of the Joshua Tree Art Gallery.

Kim Chasen began her professional art career in 1996. She co-owned Dezart One Gallery in Palm Springs from 2001-2011 and co-founded the Backstreet Art District. In all of her work, Kim seems to have an innate ability to coax a feeling of strength and vitality out of a few well chosen colors worked on a textured canvas. Lying just beneath the surface, the paintings project a double life without compromising their integrity as pure abstraction. The interior areas imply both deep space and a flat surface, making it appear as if the viewer is looking both at and through Chasen’s compositions. Kim’s work has been chosen for the Artist’s Council Exhibition (ACE) show at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2013, as well as 2014. She currently exhibits her work at Joshua Tree Art Gallery (JTAG) and STUDIO D in Palm Springs.

My father was an architect whose passion was photography. Earliest memories are at age four with him in a darkroom putting a seemingly blank piece of paper in a smelly liquid and watching an image appear. That magic moment still burns over five decades on.

Soon after graduating from Art Center College of Design, I moved from Pasadena to Venice, falling head first into the fine art crowd of the 1980’s. His first studio was two doors down from Terry O’Shea, an artist’s artist if there ever was one. O’Shea’s space was a gathering point. The regular characters were, Boyd Elder, Larry Bell, Susan Vogel, Doug Edge, Laddie Dill, Eric Orr, Ron Cooper, Lisa Lyons, Sauren Crow, Peter Alexander, Jim Ganzer, Stanley Grinstein, Joe Ray and that’s just scratching the surface. Terry took me under his wing. I gained the artists trust and respect allowing access to their process and lives. These portraits are a peek into my archives of over 36 years.

Martha is a San Francisco Bay Area textile artist. Growing up surrounded by Norwegian sweaters and her mother’s weaving, Martha developed an early passion for wool. She studied weaving for a year while living in Norway in her 20's. For the past 15 years her work has focused on making felt. She manipulates layers of wool fiber and silk fabric to create fields of color, pattern, and texture. She views her felt-making process as a form of painting.

Martha has worked with a group of fellow women artists and felters at Deep Color Studio in Kensington, CA for the past 10 years and has her own studio in Berkeley, CA. Her work has been exhibited at the Santa Cruz Art League Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

San Francisco Bay Area painter and printmaker, Mary Wold Souza, scribbles, drips colors, and applies paint with palette knives, her fingers, brushes, and sticks to create paintings that are rich with layers of intuitive engagement. Her work incorporates fragments of memory and evidence of process: calligraphic gesture; excavated layers; disrupted surface and structure; things defined and obscured.

Souza’s recent experience as a Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome made her more trusting of chance, risk-taking, and non-judgmental mark making, which has resulted in her current abstract paintings.

Mary Souza’s work has been exhibited throughout the SF Bay Area as well as Memphis TN and Houston, TX and is collected nationally and internationally. She has participated in the Artist in Residence program at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and is affiliated with the SMOMA Artists Gallery and Saatchi Art.